tuckova

beneath the waves

I don't really have a lot of fixed boundaries. It's a struggle for me to understand that other people do, and to respect them, though of course I think it's important to at least try to do so. I hear people talking about physical boundaries and I think: okay. Like there are a few people who I really don't want to touch me, ever. So I can imagine that these people who say they don't like to be touched, that's how they feel when anybody touches them. I try really hard to keep straight which people have which boundaries. But personally, with the exception of those few people who I know and don't want touching me and I have reasons for that, pretty much anybody can touch me (as a greeting, for example) pretty much any way and I'm like: cool. The part of me that would feel violated is not on my skin, it's on the other side of my skin, and nobody can touch it anyway. Similarly with emotional boundaries, personal boundaries -- the part of me that would be affected is both very far inside me and nebulous; very few people get close enough in to even approach those boundaries.

I tried for a long time to explain this and then one day I watched an octopus swimming beneath me and I understood myself. How we stretch ourselves out beyond our own imaginations to reach what we want. The constant thumping desires of our three hearts, so complex. How our brains are not contained in one place, but stretch across our bodies so that the right touch can provide information that our whole bodies process. The octopus is a master of mimicry as am I, which means when we are not sure how to behave, we behave like someone else but when it's safe we go back to dancing in the sand, touching what we want to, shining our own clear colors. If you put me in a box, in a tiny treasure chest, if you lock me inside, I will find a way to be comfortable in it or I will find a way to get out of it. A boundary is meaningless to me because it cannot hold me; I am not easily held. It is true that I can be pierced although this is more difficult. If I see you coming, sharp and pointy, I will first release a cloud of ink, a torrent of words, and see if I can't escape while you are blinded, choking. I'm sorry but I warned you. 

If you do catch us, we are delicious.

exhausting exceptionalism

One thing I like about living in a country other than the country of my birth is the expats, the immigrants, my fellow non-natives. In your home country, you tend to congregate around shared interests and sure that's true anywhere. In a foreign country in addition to liking the same music or hobby we can also congregate around the shared interest of "I don't really belong here". Some of my dearest friends in my life are people who I met abroad -- not unified by the ways that we belong but the ways we don't. As a person who never felt that she belonged particularly anywhere I also enjoy that at least now it's by choice; I've noticed that several of us have that in common as well.

 

In fact even among my non-foreign friends here (and also in Japan when I lived there) I'd say a sense of not-quite-belonging is a unifying theme. Not all of my Czech friends feel that way; some are deeply, proudly, profoundly Czech. But most feel a bit like aliens. Many have traveled a lot, lived in other countries. That sense of adventure is also of course de facto standard among expats -- who by design or default programming want to know what would happen if...

 

And in many many ways I think that the people you meet when they are traveling are the best of their people. Often the most curious, the most adventurous, the most interesting. Not always. Stupid doesn't stop at borders and plenty of brilliant curious people explore the world in non-geographic ways. 

 

Speaking for myself, living abroad has made it possible to do a lot of things I wouldn't have been able to do in my own country -- the way I've been a parent, or the work that I do (I'm valued for speaking English here; it wouldn't be so impressive in the US), and things that I've done like starting an open mic night -- if I were still in Sacramento, there would be several to choose from, created by people more skilled and less terrified than I am, and I'd just go, and I wouldn't be so pleased with myself probably. To my thinking, I'm a medium-to-small fish, and if I were in a bigger pond, or even the same size pond but with more... fish like me?... there'd be nothing interesting about me.

 

I'm thinking about this because it seems very clear to me that this is true, and I thought it was something we all knew, but lately it seems like I'm running into more and more people who think they're able to do things here (work things like have high positions in their companies or start their own businesses, and social things as well) and somehow think they'd be able to do them anywhere, because of their own innate specialness. I noticed this first specifically in terms of dudes on the ordinary-to-ugly scale dating women who so far outclassed them as to be comical. If the dudes acted like they won the lottery, fair play to them. But some of them acted like they deserved it. Like they were the prime catch that dating women out of their league would make them. 

 

As the number of foreigners increases here, the less special they are -- the less brave, the less adventurous, but also just generally less individual. There becomes an expat mindset and a further division (now that we have choices) in which we stick together according to the country we came from, which dude if I wanted to hang out with mostly Americans I would like, move there. I mean I know I do it too. But I'm starting to think that what I took as an expat feeling of being unique by virtue of being in an odd pond rather than anything innately special, or a dude feeling of being entitled to a better partner by virtue of being surrounded by a better class of women rather than anything deserved, may in fact just be people. I never thought I was that special. I'm surprised that people continue to think they are, especially as whatever amount of special they were has clearly diminished. Or possibly I am getting old and cranky. I think I'm on to something though.